Triple entendre

Puccini's 'Il tabarro'

Unless you are on a binge in one of the world’s great opera cities, seeing one opera per week might seem quite a reasonable tally for most fans. Six in a single weekend would surely be overkill – and yet that is what is available in Lyon this month.

“Puccini plus” is not, however, the type of operatic escapade in which you start to forget what daylight looks like – as was the case in Cologne several years ago, when all four operas of Wagner’s Ring were performed in a single weekend. “Puccini plus” is spread over three consecutive evenings and puts the three one-act components of Il trittico, premiered in 1918, alongside three German one-acters that were written about the same time.

Zemlinsky's 'Eine florentinische Tragödie'

These were not random pairings. Il tabarro (The Cloak), the first in Puccini’s triptych, was performed in tandem with Schoenberg’s Von heute auf morgen (From One Day to the Next). Both explore a marriage in crisis, but in starkly different musical idioms and with contrasting outcomes. Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica), second in Puccini’s scheme, was paired with Hindemith’s Sancta Susanna, another all-female opera about a nun experiencing an existential crisis. As for the third and best-known of the Trittico operas, Gianni Schicchi, a comedy set in Florence, the Opéra de Lyon found a piquant partner in Zemlinsky’s Eine florentinische Tragödie (A Florentine Tragedy).

On some nights during the festival, the three Trittico operas will be presented together, as Puccini intended – a more conventional package. What is so intriguing about the alternative pairings is that each displays two sides of a coin. You get a sense of where opera was coming from a century ago – the melodic Romantic tradition personified by Puccini – and where it was heading, in the shape of Zemlinsky’s atmospheric late romanticism and the tightly wrought modernism of Schoenberg and the young Hindemith.

Some singers in “Puccini plus” appear in more than one opera, showing off their ability (and the orchestra’s) to switch styles, and all the Puccinis are staged by a single producer, David Pountney, using a basic design by Johan Engels. The three German operas are treated to a more eclectic approach.

It’s amazing that no one has cooked up such a project before. Opera North did pioneer a similar idea in its 2004 “Eight Little Greats”, for which Pountney’s Il tabarro was originally produced. Not all of the eight one-acters were hits, but the idea was strong enough for Serge Dorny, Lyon’s opera chief, to import a shortened version. Next year he plans a festival on the theme of political imprisonment, embracing Fidelio, Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero and a new opera inspired by the 1981 abolition of the death penalty in France.

Of the three Puccini works, the most conventionally staged – Il tabarro – was ironically the most successful, despite the uncertain scene-setting of Engels’s cube-like design. Csilla Boross’s Giorgetta provided a lusty centrepiece, wielding a soprano that soared and scored. Thiago Arancam, a Brazilian tenor with a budding European career, made a virile Luigi; Werner Van Mechelen was a serviceable Michele.

Boross lacked the softness of tone for Angelica the following evening, and Pountney’s production, dominated by an oppressive Madonna and an institutionalised brick façade, was visually and emotionally sterile. As for Gianni Schicchi, humour never has been Pountney’s strong suit. An over-caricatured cast indulged in vulgarities galore, including a gratuitous bout of oral sex between Lauretta and Rinuccio, the only innocent characters in the drama. Van Mechelen returned as Schicchi, but vocal honours fell to Benjamin Bernheim’s ardent young tenor.

Schoenberg's 'Von heute auf morgen'

While Gaetano d’Espinosa opened up the sunny orchestral colours of the three Puccini operas, veteran conductor Bernhard Kontarsky proved adept at elucidating the grittier idiom of the three German works: in fact, it’s hard to imagine a musician more steeped in Schoenberg’s strident serialism. Kontarsky made Von heute auf morgen sound as radical today as it must have done at its 1930 premiere, and John Fulljames’s seamlessly stylish staging underlined the point by starting the performance in Bauhaus décor and ending up with laptop and computerised pixellations. The question behind this theatrical trick was the same as that posed by Schoenberg: does “modern” (in terms of marriage and sexual morality) mean uninhibited and unconventional, or does it merely imply boredom with the familiar?

Engels’s bright décor and Marie-Jeanne Lecca’s period costumes created a necessary counterpoint to Schoenberg’s intellectual music; but the tone changed for Hindemith’s portrait of a sex-obsessed nun. Apart from some satanic symbols, Fulljames’s staging remained dark and abstract, so as to focus on the mounting hysteria of the title character. Agnes Selma Weiland, stripped to the buff, gave a courageous performance.

Zemlinsky’s three-hander, a lurid drama of sex and revenge (is opera ever about anything else?), was a fitting climax. Georges Lavaudant’s 2007 production, in striking faux-medieval designs by Jean-Pierre Vergier, proved as gripping as the music, while Martin Winkler created a mesmerising centrepiece as Simone, the cuckolded husband who lures his love-rival to death.

Taken in isolation, few of the six operas in “Puccini plus” would have added up to a stand-out experience. The Schoenberg one-acter is musically arid, the Hindemith dramaturgically slight, and I’ve seen better stagings of the Trittico operas. Taken together, however, they made for a memorable weekend.

http://festival-puccini.opera-lyon.com, until February 13